It is becoming more important to be able to provide telecommunication services to fixed and mobile subscribers as efficient and inexpensively as possible. Further, the increased use of mobile applications has resulted in much focus on developing wireless systems capable of delivering large amounts of data at high speed.
Currently, as part of the Proximity Services (ProSe) capability introduced in Release 13 of the LTE Standards, a basic level of functionality has been described to allow network-to-UE relaying, specifically targeting Public Safety use cases. This functionality relies on the reuse of a sidelink radio communication channel between devices to route traffic at the IP layer.
However, relaying of data at the IP layer may suffer poor performance and may limit the data rates attainable.